What would you change for CoH2?

Smoother diminishing returns on ED instead of "good, good, good, worthless".

Complete revamp of defense. It should work more like recharge where the first bonus gives the greatest effect but latter increase do less, and not as it does now where it gets better and better up to the point when it does nothing.

No haste or stamina powers. Powers should do something specific, but just make you better at everything. If end is supposed to be a limited resource, then let it be really limited.

I agree, new engine, to allow the team to do more..World of Heroes

The sad part of this thread is that all of these ideas all seem just out of reach of what we currently have.

I would change the way missions are given. You would street sweep till you got a tip, which would lead to a mission. There would be a chance that the mission would be a story arc. In story arcs, you would rescue certain NPC's who would later appear in the game as contacts. The contacts would have unique arcs that you could only get through that contact. Zones would be more like striga or croatoa, where the arcs are contained in that zone and they tell a story about it.

I would also expand the power pool system, so that:
1) It would have a greater range of non combat powers, ie hacking/detective worki
2) each pool could have more than 4 powers.

They would be set up along the same tiers we have now, there would just be more options in some of the tiers. For example, there would be some sort of "Weapons" or "gadgets" pool, where the first tier would have things like a baseball bat attack, or a pistol attack. The second tier would have something like grenades of various flavors(stun, damage, smoke, etc) and the third tier would have stuff like body armor.

I would have Stances like that other game.

I would have zones make more sense. For example, in CoH certain zones connect to each other. But in general, it almost never makes sense to use those connections because the train is much faster. The ideal would be that either would offer advantages. Also, the city would be setup to look more like a real city similar to how that other game has their main city setup.

I would have underwater areas.

I think I would like to see the inventory system overhauled. So as an example, you could craft temp powers and get a item to put in your inventory. You could trade these temp powers with others, and only hold a finite amount of them on you. Sort of like how WoW does inventions. I would kep the enhancement system as is for the most part, but I would shift the levels you get stuff, so that you would use TO's till the teens, DO's till the late 20's and SO's after that. I believe this is how the game was originally setup, but then they decided to let us get (some)SO's at 20 and later all SO's at 20

I think for excort missions, the NPC's wouldnt always follow you. Depending on the NPC they would go in set routes.

I'd also revamp the way IOs are set up. Now we have a mostly binary system where they're either awesome or worthless, and the prices reflect that.

I'd do it so each set augments one thing. One set does Accuracy, another does Damage, another Recharge, and so on. That way you have to decide what you want to emphasize rather than there being obvious right choices. I'd still leave in Purples, since 50s ought to be super.

1. Orbital Death Cannon Melee

2. Shiny Tights Masks

3. New Difficulty Settings
- PermaDeath - character is deleted on defeat
- PWND - character is deleted on defeat, account is deleted, your credit card is used to pay for flowers & motel rooms in the next town over, and the credit card bill is hand delivered by Positron to your wife

4. Persistent game music - not just short little clips, but actual scores of decent music

5. Flying Stripeless Zebra mounts

6. Winged Hornless Unicorns

7. Environmental Melee - wield enemies as weapons to defeat enemies


Truth be told, after 7 years I'd settle for just adding number 2 to this game.

Change the name to World of Heroes. Then hire Keanu Reeves to do a commercial.

"WoH, I know kung-fu."

I'd stick to the game's strengths; Customization:

-Larger variety of body types.
--Standard male/female body
--Quadruped (4 legs)
--Centaur (4 legs and human upper body)
--Naga (human upper body, snake lower body)
--Four-arms/Six-Arms
--Huge head (think a big head with little limbs coming out)

There'd be fewer actual power-sets, and just varied 'effects' you can add to your powers (similar to Interface) and more animations per power to choose from. So there wouldn't be Electric Blast, Energy Blast and Radiation Blast, just 'Energy Blast' with custom particle effects you could choose (lightning, light, etc.) with extra effects you could add to them (concussive energy, radiation, ion).

Animations would be limited by body type. So Nagas picking up Hand-to-Hand wouldn't have access to kick animations, just punches and perhaps a few custom tail-whips, Quadrupeds wouldn't have normal gun/sword animations, just back/head mounted guns and/or body mounted blades/mouth held weapons, etc. etc.

Origins would have tags associated with them in a complex web of 'advantages/disadvantages' so, if you customize your powers a certain way, you could have 'Ghost killing bullets' or 'Armor piercing claws' in exchange for choosing a disadvantage such as aligning your powers with the Fey or chemical instability or some such. This would be optional but add more specific character customization of powers vs the environment they're interacting with rather than limited customization to just the base effects.

Gameplay and design tweaks mostly.

-New graphics engine. We're running on OLD hardware here, and no matter how many new doodads and shiny bits we bolt onto it, at the end of the day we're still using an engine from the early PS2 era.

-"Denser" content. City of Heroes at launch had a TON of content and zones, most of which were added with the intention that they would be updated later. Most never were, and nowadays we have a ton of zones that are ghost towns. Launch with less content, but put more effort into making it polished, well written, and interesting. The launch content in this game has not aged well, and nowadays I avoid it entirely. Less missions, less zones, add nothing with the intention of updating it later, and only then start adding new stuff.

-Make Archetypes more distinct. Sharing powersets and whatnot is fine, but at the end of the day a lot of AT's play very similarly (most notably the melee classes). Make the AT's more specialized, but not in the sense that teaming would be required (oh god no), but in the sense that every single AT would require it's own unique tactics. Maybe cut down on the number of powersets too, but make each powerset really unique, rather than just the sort of "palette swap" powersets we got at launch.

-In short, make the game smaller, and more focused. That's not to say the game couldn't get bigger later, but the dev team has a bad habit of coming up with great ideas, implementing them halfway, and then losing interest. Make a game that has a clear focus and a clear goal moving forward to start, and then worry about adding new things to it.

What would I change? Well for starters I would never create a system where there is such a huge disparity on how the ATs and powerset perform. There never should be a grand canyon size gap in solo speed for the damage ATs and support classes. I think that in itself has hurt the game and led to so many unneeded nerfs. When players cant solo fast or feel their damage is poor they will gravitate towards the flavor of the month builds due to that. If everyone can solo almost the same speed then it does not matter what you pick as much. To me we should be picking the powersets for thematic reasons for the characters not because there is an overwhelming reason to play a powerset or AT because its that much better than every thing else. It took them gawd knows how long to realize this when they buffed doms after they created the VEATs. Thats too long to realize that the sky is not going to fall when you have a support AT that does decent damage. Lastly there would be absolutely no pvp unless they could keep it 110% seperate from pve. Too many pvp changes that bleed over into pve have also cost this game too many good players.

I'd incorporate a Dragon Age style of tactics programming to pets/henchmen, allowing the user to set specific instructions for them to follow. Intelligent programming would basically allow a player to have a "hands free" pet that doesn't act completely brain dead.

Example:



I'd also take down the war walls completely and fill out the zones with far more stuff to do. I'd incorporate real-time weather cycles and give NPCs AI routines. For example, a contact that's a cop would have patrols and a schedule. He's be somewhere during the day according to that schedule. At night time he wouldn't be around because he's at home. In the morning you can watch him leave his house and travel to work. During the day he could be found at the police department. This would give the world a much more life-like feel.

I'd have traffic that made sense and airports and stores and restaurants that are actually incorporated into the game world. There would be movie theaters and sports arenas and all of the rest of the stuff you'd see in a real world, and I'd design them so that in-game events would have an impact on the routines of all the people. I'd have it so that the areas in the game could be quickly and easily modified to reflect certain story points. Maybe there's a couple of months where Dr. Explosion sets off a massive bomb in Atlas Park and takes down 3 buildings. For the next 3 months of real time, that area would be under construction. It would start with clean-up, then lots of planning (surveyors scribbling on blue prints), then you start to see scaffolding going up, then finally the buildings are rebuilt.

I'd make it so that you could go into most buildings within the game world (not an instance) just for the hell of it.

I'd have buildings that players could move into and rent out as their personal living spaces. I'd make it so that you could buy furniture from a furniture store and electronics and fish tanks and all of that jazz. It would be like Sims-CoH. You could design your own apartment the way you see fit, within the design of the place. It would be a game in and of itself. And I wouldn't make it so that you just went into some random interface and got instanced into your apartment. You'd have to go to a specific building and within that specific building you had to deal with the specific management and pay their specific price. Better apartments would cost more and there would be an aesthetic difference between what you could rent out in a high-end Founder's Falls apartment vs some dump in King's Row. You'd be able to know who your neighbors are, too. I'd even make it so you could buy and build houses in specific, expansive suburban areas designed specifically to house players. They would be real neighborhoods with schools and grocery stores and all of that. You'd even be able to buy houses and then rent them out to other players! The entire housing thing would be a huge part of the game!

I would make it so that a supergroup base was a place that you designed from the ground up, including the exterior. The exterior of the building wouldn't be more than a fancy door that sends you to your base, it would be a real, physical location that you can go to in the game world (either through instancing or some other means). Example of instancing: You'd teleport to your secret base location and emerge on a mountain and there before you, nestled between two great peaks, hidden from view and protected from outside attacks is your base. And of course because we don't live in a M.C Escher painting, the interior of your base would have to be designed around the actual physical design of the building. To help with size constraints, subterranean construction would be possible. I'd also integrate a "Danger Room" style AE interface type of room you could build to train with like the X-Men do.

I'd incorporate far more mission tilesets and templates and a vast amount of custom maps for story arc content. I'd make each mission door be specific to a particular map, with exterior buildings have interiors that match their design. That way every single time you go into the warehouse on main street, it's the same. It doesn't magically morph into something else. That sounds repetitive, but I'd make it so that every single building in the game that you could enter for missions had a unique interior.

I'd drastically change the way enemy spawns work in the environment. It just doesn't make sense that masses of gangs would all hang around in plain view all over every single zone. I'd probably make it so that there were certain areas where enemies spawned and certain districts that are run down and forgotten or completely taken over by the gangs where enemies will spawn.

I would almost completely eliminate worthless contacts. Ones that just dish out 15 random missions. Almost every contact would have a story arc or a be part of something greater.

I'd reduce the ability to run "repeatables" like Police Band and Newspaper missions but increase the number of TFs and early game Raid style content.

I'd introduce equipment, but not to the insanity of other loot grinding types of games. I'd probably just introduce accessories that would provide a myriad of passive benefits, from anything to combat related stuff or by increasing the amount of Infamy you get for defeating enemies or other indirect benefits.

I'd change the way the powers and enhancement systems but I'm not quite sure how I would go about, other than that it would be simpler to use. I'd probably take out slots completely and incorporate some system where powers you select already have a set number of slots. You can then use these slots to add any "enhancement" effect the power would accept. Upon leveling up you can go along your normal progression tree, which would include new powers and upgraded versions of the powers you already or skills that modify your existing powers to make them better. For example, you have Full Auto at level 32 and at level 35 you can spend skill points on a passive power that increases the number of targets Full Auto can hit. This would include passive skills that add more slots to your powers, but it would be a trade-off type of thing where you choose what you want to spend your skill points on, much like most modern RPGs these days are using.

That's all I can think or right now...

Fingers for sure.

Edit: Yeah, no more war walls, except perhaps around Terra Volta and maybe some hazard zones. I'd much rather prefer how things are in Praetoria.

And windows in SG bases looking out to whatever zone you want.